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Home » Data » Dataset use in Stata » Discrepancy in stunting, wasting, underweight prevalence for Nepal DHS 2001
Re: Discrepancy in stunting, wasting, underweight prevalence for Nepal DHS 2001 [message #13697 is a reply to message #13588] Fri, 08 December 2017 11:21 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Trevor-DHS is currently offline  Trevor-DHS
Messages: 802
Registered: January 2013
Senior Member
There are a number of small differences in the approach that DHS has used for the calculation of the z-scores compared with the approach WHO has used. These include:
1) DHS flagged all 3 anthropometric indicators (Ht/Age, Wt/Age, Wt/Ht) whenever any of the 3 were flagged, whereas WHO flagged only individual indicators.
2) DHS suppressed the Z-scores for flagged cases whereas WHO leaves the z-scores in the data even when they are flagged. In your code whenever you set stunting, wasting or underwt, you need to check the flag values.
3) DHS only includes children for whom both month and year of birth were reported, whereas WHO was including cases in which the month and year were imputed.
4) DHS selects the de facto children, whereas the WHO code does not specifically select either de facto or de jure. In some analyses, de jure have been used instead.

More recently DHS and WHO and UNICEF have harmonized approaches more. In recent surveys, DHS no longer suppresses all 3 indicators if just one is flagged (point 1 above). WHO/UNICEF now exclude children with month or year of birth in their analyses, and select de facto children when matching DHS results.

These are the main differences between the results you will get with the zscore06 code and the DHS computed z-scores.
 
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